Letter of the Day | Cannot turn a blind eye to heinous past
Published:Saturday | October 31, 2020 | 12:07 AM
THE EDITOR, Madam:
The Proceeds of Crime Act (POCA) provides for the confiscation, or civil recovery, of the earnings from crime and came into effect on May 30, 2007. This relatively new law is virtually a copy of the principles of the money laundering legislation in the United Kingdom (UK). Terms like ‘dirty money’, ‘tainted property’, ‘illicit funds’, and ‘criminal conduct’ are used to describe the activities of persons involved in unlawful gain, usually to the detriment of others.
The POCA designates activities on or after May 2007 as qualifying for examination to determine whether that activity is criminal and amounts to, and produces, illicit gain. By way of mutual assistance, the UK and Jamaica have entered into an arrangement whereby property or monies determined to be the proceeds of crime can be confiscated here or in England and turned over to the country in which the criminal conduct took place.
It is against this legislative scheme and enforcement framework that I wish to examine the multiple crimes against humanity involved in the trafficking of humans during the transatlantic slave trade. Without a doubt, the wealth accumulated from the three-hundred-year trade was much more rewarding and extensive than any other criminal activity known to man. It is our mission, in the reparation movement, to track down and recover that wealth. Britain has conveniently sought our mutual assistance to stem crime by stripping the pockets of modern criminals. We, in the movement, are inviting the UK to look at the empirical evidence provided by their own Slave Compensation Commission to manage the £20 million paid to planters in the 1830s. The 1772 Somerset case, which led to the freeing of an enslaved man aboard a ship in English waters on the basis that slavery was not tenable on English soil, is the starting point of the argument in support of payment to those enslaved in other parts of the English realm.
Though the records of slave owners do not have distinct entries of the enslaved themselves, there are registers of enslaved people that place them on specific plantations and whose owners are known. The crimes of the transatlantic slave trade are documented and well known, including human trafficking, murder, rape, amputations, and the horrors of forced labour. The victims of those involved in the crime of slavery are clearly identifiable , and so are their descendants. Corporations like Royal Bank of Scotland, Barclays Bank, HSBC, and Lloyds Banking Group, to name a few, have benefited directly or indirectly from slavery. There can be no statute of limitations relating to crimes against humanity. Consequently, the passage of time should not prevent those who benefited from owning up to their past ill-gotten gains and compensating those left destitute in 1838, left with their chains removed and nothing else. Left with no job, no land, no formal education, with their heritage destroyed and family torn apart. They are undoubtedly the victims of crime.
The glaring inequities created by historical injustice to a captured and enslaved people, left to stand helplessly gazing at the wealth created by them in the hands of prosperous families and corporations, is in itself additional punishment. The proceeds of crime must be repatriated to those who created it and against whom the cruellest treatment in recorded history by one set of humans against another was committed.
We cannot support confiscation and repossession of property in our modern history and turn a blind eye to a more lasting, heinous past when all the evidence is available to us to deal justly with the proceeds of the crime of slavery.
BERT SAMUELS
Attorney -at-Law